2.5. Alternative Displays

The Web isn't just for personal computers anymore! Web browsers
are increasingly making their way into our living rooms, briefcases,
and cars, in the form of WebTV, handheld PDA devices, cellular
phones, and dashboard devices. These extra-small displays introduce
new design concerns.

2.5.1. WebTV

WebTV, a device that
turns an ordinary television and phone line into a web browser, hit
the market in 1996 and is experiencing a slow but steady growth in
market share. As of this writing, it is barely a blip on the radar
screen of overall browser usage, but because numbers are increasing,
some developers are taking its special requirements into
consideration. Some sites are being developed specifically for WebTV.

WebTV uses a television rather than
a monitor as a display device. The live space in the WebTV browser is
a scant 544 378 pixels. The browser permits vertical paging
down, but not horizontal scrolling, so wider graphics are partially
obscured and inaccessible, or resized to fit. Principles for
designing legible television graphics apply, such as the use of light
text on dark backgrounds rather than vice versa and the avoidance of
any elements less than 2 pixels in width. These and other guidelines
are provided on WebTV's special developer site at http://developer.webtv.net.

Of particular interest is WebTV Viewer, which shows you how your web
page will look on WebTV, right from the comfort of your computer. It
is available for free for both Windows and Mac (although the Windows
version is more up-to-date as of this writing). For information on
WebTV Viewer, go to http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/WebTVVwr.asp.

2.5.2. Hand-held Devices

The increased popularity and usefulness of
the Web combined with the growing reliance on hand-held
communications devices (such as palm-top computers,
PDAs, and
cellular
telephones) has resulted in web browsers squeezing into the coziest
of spaces. Typically, wireless devices are used to view applications
designed especially for them (see Chapter 32, "WAP and WML"), not
the graphically-rich web sites that we are accustomed to on our
computer browsers. Therefore, it is generally not necessary to worry
about how your site will fare on a microbrowser.

The typical mobile phone with Internet capabilities has a display
area that is between 95 and 120 pixels wide and 50 to 65 pixels high.
Newer phones and PDAs may have larger screens (approximately 300 by
100 pixels). A more meaningful measurement than pixel size is the
amount of text that can fit on the screen. In general, mobile
browsers can display only three to six lines of text at a time with
12 to 20 characters per line.

The majority of mobile devices (particularly in North America) have
only black and white LCD displays. However, in Japan, mobile devices
with 8-bit color displays are growing in popularity.